


languentibus in purgatorio

by doreah



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Femslash February, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Sharing a Bed, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22891246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doreah/pseuds/doreah
Summary: They've been having an affair without even touching.
Relationships: Commander Fred Waterford/Serena Joy Waterford, June Osborne | Offred/Serena Joy Waterford, Nick Blaine/June Osborne | Offred
Comments: 13
Kudos: 80
Collections: Femslash February





	languentibus in purgatorio

**Author's Note:**

  * For [warning_sine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/warning_sine/gifts).



> [Lili Boulanger: _"Du fond de l'abîme (Psaume 130)"_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLZmONu6ls) [1917]

Serena Joy begins each morning the same way: alone. Everyday the sun rises, sometimes managing to poke through heavy grey clouds, sometimes not. Those latter days should be the more difficult ones to wake in, but she finds the opposite is true. There is a silence to them, something secretive and barren, like looking in a mirror. When dawn is soaked with a sodden blanket of threatening snow, getting out of bed actually feels like an accomplishment and so little these days yields any sense of reward, so she will take whatever scraps she can, wherever and however she may find them.

The scene outside the windows never changes but it’s less noticeable on such dreary days. It’s always a land of not yet winter, just hanging perilously on the cusp of it, or alternately, digging its heels in and not letting it go as it attempts to pass. Sometimes of course there is snow, like winters used to be before all the nuclear warheads were dropped in the name of salvation and far before the climate (and God, she supposes) had given up hope of sustaining mankind. But mostly, it’s as if all the old gods got together and said: _Fuck it, we’re done here. Let them have their purgatory. Heaven is too good for them, and Hell is too much fun._

So, that’s exactly where she sits in the morning, with slivers of dull light slipping under the dense curtains. Those heavy curtains, they smell like her grandfather’s old house in farm country, and she shivers when she gets too close to them. So, Rita is tasked with their care, even in the mornings but only after Serena has risen and is drinking her tea downstairs. The pungent, ancient scent is intolerable. 

Purgatory is doing nothing, and that is exactly what she does, day after day after day. She becomes nothing itself.

Sometimes she can hear Fred waking in the room down the hall, with his obnoxious, bellowing yawns and heavy footfalls meant to wake the rest of the household. She wishes she could say she misses the mornings waking up beside her husband in their marriage bed, but that yearning faded years ago. It’s better this way, she used to tell herself when her nightmares woke her in the early morning and nobody was there anymore. (That has passed.) It is why Gilead has instructed Wives and Commanders to follow such rules. Some don’t, she suspects, but she is Godly and her household is holy. 

Well, the household is trying. She is trying. God’s grace is the only way to escape this. 

Each day, she has her tea with milk—coffee if she is lucky and her stomach doesn’t resist. Maybe toast and butter. Scones, her secret weakness, are a luxury only available when there is a surplus of butter. Fred eats an egg or two, maybe has a slice of meat, and sips his one cup of black coffee until it’s cold, every day. The same. He reads the paper published only for Commanders, or stares at his laptop screen in earnest. They speak, maybe. Perfunctory greetings and occasional gossip: whatever he deems innocuous enough to share with a woman. Only rarely does he forget where they are and who she is meant to be. Even so, he never takes her advice. Not anymore. 

In the afternoon, she paints, or knits, or tends to her garden. Women’s work. Occasionally, she will visit with other Wives and exchange all the same predetermined phrases of her class. Lunch is soup, maybe a sandwich. Rita can only make three different soups, says her husband. He dislikes mushrooms and fish. Mostly, when the struggling plants in her greenhouse require no more attention, she stays in her sitting room, staring at the walls and counting down minutes until dinner and letting bitterness prickle under her skin. 

In the evening, they eat supper in the dining room together. There are many options for food then, but it is never a surprise. Food is rationed, and she’s not a stupid woman. She knows exactly what foods Gilead grows and in which regions of the country, and what its imports are. She knows more than the men would like to believe. Sometimes there is what counts as dessert here: some apple loaf, seasonal fruit salad, maybe a carrot cake without the frosting. The best desserts are only made for special occasions and Rita is not a very good baker anyway. Sugar is strictly controlled.

Some may call her life empty, but it’s not. Like the everlasting fires of purification in holy lore, it’s stuffed full of monotonous routine and they are not the same thing. Not even close. At least emptiness provides some numbing sense of space, and perhaps even of a freedom because of that. If things are empty, anything at all can fill them. There’s a different flavour to the loneliness one feels in an inescapable routine than it does in emptiness. Liminal space is nothing and everything you want it to be, at once. It allows for the evocation of feelings, whatever they may be. There is so much space there, and very few rules. In contrast, the strict nature of her Purgatory is simply nothingness, a blank terrible slate of never-ending tedium. All to prove one's worth somehow. Because, after all, it is a gateway, not a destination.

Even the Handmaid doesn’t push the status quo far enough to make any ripples. She’s timid and dimwitted, Serena thinks with disdain. As the Wife, she has no desire to engage in any conversation beyond the basics of her station towards the lower, arguably sentient being. Even Rita has more personality than this one. As a result, nothing changes very much. She and Fred must do the Ceremony now, of course, every month like clockwork. Maybe Serena could get excited about that irregular blip in her nights, but for that to happen, she’d first have to not loathe the entire thing so potently. And does she ever loathe it, with every single cell in her body and for more reasons than anybody would guess. Sometimes she sits on the edge of her bed before the Ceremony and tries to count them all as she smokes. Mostly she loses count at about seven, her mind wandering off down paths of resentment and fury. Or, more often, she is interrupted by Rita or Nick.

Well, that’s something to occupy the time. Rage. It feels unpredictable. And cathartic. It’s probably not nearly as spontaneous as she believes, but the idea alone is reassuring in a way, that she still has the capacity to feel something beyond habitual boredom, and all the hostility and bitterness that accompanies it. 

More than anything maybe, it’s the silence that wounds deepest. She’s become accustomed to each and every creak of the wood, every crack of plaster, every whine of a hinge down to what door is being opened or closed, every footfall above or below. There is nothing left to be surprised by any longer. 

It should probably surprise her when she realises that Fred has taken the Handmaid to that illegal booze can full of prostitutes, dressed in her clothes. Or at least some of them. On her cloak, she catches a whiff of a perfume that isn’t hers, something spicy and sweet that Serena Joy Waterford would never wear. He must have bought it for the Handmaid, and part of her doesn’t understand how she could have missed all that lead up. Then again, Nick and her husband are nothing if not discreet when they want to be, despite her being aware of every inch of this house. 

Anger destroys the quiet blanket that cloaks every room in the house in a way mere avoidance doesn’t. What Fred has done to her, and her pride and godliness of this household, is disgusting because Serena has a plan that doesn’t involve lechery or promiscuity, or anything that would endanger the precarious position she has in God’s eyes, and Gilead. Anything here can vanish at any second and she requires everything to be exactly in line for that baby, whenever she is graced with a blessed miracle.

A baby will change the routine, even make it bearable because there would finally be a reason to live, to do things, to watch an ever-changing child grow up. 

Everything will have been worth it.

\----

The Handmaid hangs herself.

Or so it appears. Serena Joy can never be too sure here because the noose looks professional, the setting too immaculate. It wouldn’t be the first time her husband has killed. But she strikes the suspicion from her mind when she thinks about how sullen and unbearable the Handmaid had been, and how she fucked Fred, and how she brought this ridiculous misery onto herself. She attempts to feel pity, and ignores the warning glances from the rest of the house, as if she’s somehow at fault for this too. Handmaids don’t commit suicide because a Wife refuses to speak to them except with threats, or sequesters her to her room, or is generally cold. Surely, that is part of the training for their position, and part of their penance for their lives before Gilead. Wives should not be expected to be kind. That doesn’t make babies.

She is not alone in her punishments, nor her ire. All Wives are the same; they are expected to be. There is no need to view these Handmaids as anything but exactly what they are. And there is no doubt what unholy sinners they were.

It’s not even that much of a shock that such a pathetic being was too weak to handle the esteem bestowed upon her.

\----

The new one is even worse. She appears docile and well-behaved, but she uses that cloying female voice Serena hates. Too flirty. And she oversteps her position almost immediately, full of petty challenge. That is the moment Serena realises this one will not be so easy to manage. There have been plenty of women Serena has known that are too close in similarity to this one. She has a glint in her blue eyes, a hidden smirk on her lips, and a scent of trouble about her. 

Worse still, Serena hates the way her heartbeat races immediately when she realises this. The electrifying tingle that zips up her spine in anticipation should feel like a warning, but the warmth that settles in its wake lends itself to something resembling pleasure. A perilous hint of something changing. Finally.

Her husband cannot have the new one. Serena is getting this child from her, and he will not interfere this time.

_If I get trouble, I will give trouble back_ , she warns with measured severity.

The Handmaid flinches, just a little. Not enough for Serena to believe it. Oh, how intensely she desires to have a reason to give trouble back. It’s something to do. Like a flint stone and steel being smashed together, maybe there’s a spark, just a flash enough to ignite the tinder--if there is any left in this airless world. What a rush.

Maybe this one is the one.

\----

She leaves her three roses when the Handmaid is late.

All day, she drifts around the house, rearranging and placing items in different spots to make things as perfect outside as they feel inside. It’s happiness, or perhaps a certain pride that she hasn’t felt in a long time. Not since, well, before Gilead. If she’s allowed to admit that.

She takes Offred to Naomi Putnam’s. That’s new. Special. Something other than the regular routine. But she doesn’t even recognise how strange it is until the other Wives titter under their breaths when she arrives, surrogate in tow. They snicker even more noticeably when she places Baby Angela in the arms of a sinner. This time Serena breaks the rules and brings up the daughter from before, with softness instead of envy. All she can see in the Handmaid is hope, and an answer to her most desperate prayer.

Is this sacrilege?

There is purpose, swirling like ink through her fingers, its intoxicating scent fills her nose and stiffens her resolve. So, when she sees the beating, she leaps. She has defended the weak and defenceless before, the unborn children and the future children, but never with her very own body.

Her hands are everywhere on Offred's body, and yet she needs more. She needs ten pairs of hands for everywhere she longs to touch and protect. Feral-blooded and enraged, she warns off the predators and they back away, even the Eye with a gun and all the power backs off. It is a feeling that she had thought was gone, and a talent she thought had shrivelled away. She strokes her waist, her hair, her arm, her forehead.

It's about the baby, she reminds herself after she takes the Handmaid's hand and feels the hesitant squeeze in return. This is entirely novel, and she enjoys it. 

In the nursery, surrounded by ripe promise, she wants to touch more, to be set ablaze, to feel her fingertips across skin again, and her skin is so soft, so unlike Fred. She yearns to press her lips to another person, perhaps even knowing they are merely substitute for the one she wants most. Or perhaps not. 

So, she does, briefly but she doesn't allow for that idea to fester any longer than it should. This is a blessed house, not a wicked one.

\----

It turns out that there has always been a furious pyre blazing away on the other side of her frosted demeanour, and one that she probably suspected existed as she’d felt licks of it during riots and protests. It’s the burning altar she requires for sacrifice to the gods, or just one. The bloodthirstiest one of the lot. Everything goes up in flames, and she rages, throws her body around to cause pain, throws her words and control even further. She hates.

And that is something to do as well. It passes the time and occupies her mind. She paints less now, gardens more. More ruthlessly she plucks dying shoots, and more cruelly she leaves pieces to die. She knits when she must. Mostly she avoids and she prays.

Through the months, she attempts to shun the Handmaid as much as possible, except for the Ceremony, and the way they share disdain for the event seems to burn inside her gut, but probably for different reasons. Where the top of her head bumps against Serena’s crotch during the process, it burns too. A lot. Please stop, she begs of her body, every single time it does something new and brings her attention to novel sensations.

Of course something must be done. It appears that Fred is not made to be a father to his own blood and the whispers abound in the neighbourhood and beyond about impotent men. _Not Fred_ , she had said. _No, not him. My fault. It is my fault God refrains from His blessing_. _My fault._

That stings somewhere deep inside. How would He feel about these lies?

Nick agrees too quickly, as if it is a dream coming true and Serena saw it coming years ago, how easy a man he is to sway. And then it happens with Nick role-playing his dream of being Commander, and it’s over as Serena tries not to watch, but she can’t help the twisted glances. To make sure it doesn’t go _too_ far, she insists. Not even her conscious believes her anymore. 

She doesn’t consider the longer-lasting implications, or the Hell that may be released. 

\----

Fred gives up on the marriage and Serena falls to her knees at his feet to save it. Absolute devotion always made things better before but he doesn’t want her perverse prayers in the way she says them any longer.

That also isn’t a surprise. They are both deadened shells, full of nothing but ashes and discarded by the life that once swelled within them.

\----

There are spurts of something complicated and bitter mixed into the monotony now. Every morning, she still wakes, alone, in the quiet to a dull landscape outside the window. She continues to drink tea and have toast with butter. The afternoons are spent still tending to orchids and roses that the grey mould will not leave alone. She visits with Naomi, and Grace, and Eleanor, and whatever other Wives she can find. She eats one of three different soups, no mushrooms, no fish. The painting seems to have lapsed after a while, and the knitting taken up precedence, despite how much she detests it. The baby doesn't need watercolour flowers; it needs something to wear and she makes pants and jumpers in white, yellow, and secretly pink. She hides the pink garments at the bottom of the massive clothes chest, her fingers crossed in hiding as well.

At night she still goes to bed alone in a room that has yet to feel like home. She threw out all her books, her journals, her pens, colours, and pushed her husband from their bed. She replaced it all with blue dresses and matching shoes, telling herself she was home-making. But as the newness faded and reality sunk in, she knew it could never be _home_.

The silence shifts, bends, and breaks with a slow current of chaos that the Handmaid drags along behind her everywhere she goes. Serena notices how her own gaze lingers too long, how her breath catches at inopportune times, how a simple and routine perusal of the body requires an abrupt shake to her own senses. It’s only a red dress, the same as always. No, it’s the company that matters, she insists to herself. The Mexican delegates. It’s nerves.

Except Serena Joy doesn’t get nervous. Not ever.

\----

The Handmaid makes snide comments under her breath, and sometimes loud enough to hear. She rolls her eyes, shrugs her shoulders, drags her feet unnecessarily, snickers, sighs, and any number of petulant, childish, passive-aggressive habits. Even the slightest quirk of her pale lips drives Serena up the wall. God, she _hates_ her.

Before that riot, Fred once scolded her that she's too sensitive. Serena had scoffed, and straightened her shoulders, sticking her nose in the air. He was calling her weak, she knew, thin-skinned and irrational. He had insisted that she toughen up, as if she'd been anything but. 

Obviously, she admits with a sense of shame, that had never happened. All the Handmaid has to do is look at her the wrong way and Serena flies into a fury, with little to no provocation. The way she skulks around, cutting her blue eyes at Serena as if she knows she so much better, it feels like needles burrowing under her skin and Serena is helpless to scratch at them. Everything itches constantly. It's worse when Fred leers at her red-cloaked form with that glint of absolute possession in his eyes, or when Rita regards her with that secret camaraderie, and especially when Nick gazes over her skin, fondly, knowingly, protectively. It's the worst when she smiles back.

It's then that she longs to rip at her own blue sleeves and tear at her pale skin that is prickling with envy and a blistering, empty yearning for something she can't name. Something she refuses to name.

Offred makes her feel so _fucking_ inadequate in every single way, by simply existing.

\----

It’s been nearly two years now. Two years of bitterness. Two years of waking alone and cold. Two years of toast and knitting and greenhouses and the impetuous Handmaid flaunting around her house. Two years of swallowing bile, and pretending she doesn't resent every moment.

When Offred brings up her daughter from before, it’s revolting. She’s so good at finding exactly the right moments to rub it in Serena’s face what she had, and what is missing from this house. When Naomi digs into old wounds that Serena didn’t know were even visible to the outside world, it stings like a wasp. Not gentle, not like a prick of her roses. It’s angry and designed by nature to brand her with pain, and shame. The welts Naomi leaves behind are no less intolerable even if they are invisible.

Then she finds the lipstick.

Wives don’t wear lipstick. Only those foul women of the night, in those filthy brothels that are whispered about in curious hushed tones between Wives passing in darkened corridors. No, never in the bright sitting rooms and at opulent dining tables. In the cracks where men don’t care to look.

While she doesn’t doubt anymore that Fred may have been visiting prostitutes with the other Handmaid, slowly the new pieces are coming together. For months, or years even, she had wilfully turned away from knowledge as God had once instructed. She will not be the woman to make that mistake in the Garden again.

Then she finds the dress, a confirmation, mocking her final loss in its gaudy glitter and stinking like cheap perfume.

Unlike so many of the other times, the novelty of this revelation is not welcomed. Where is Purgatory when you most desire it? And how far away monotony feels.

\----

She has no shortage of punishments at her fingertips and quite frankly, she is enjoying the chance to test them all out. The previous Handmaid was too stupid to tempt Serena like this, but this one, this Offred, is insolent and asking for it. Part of her wonders if Offred is just as bored and this is a way to pass the looming passage of slow time. 

First, she lashes out in the familiar way. The sting in her hand is pleasant and the sound Offred makes as she falls to the floor is more satisfying than any confrontation with Fred could ever be. It infuses her body with something good to watch another woman slump to the ground, looking exactly as she feels. Blood, Offred's blood, leaks from the wound above her eye and Serena looks in awe at her handiwork. Such power. It reverberates blithely through her muscles until she remembers why she wanted to do that in the first place. Why she planned it. Why she waited to catch the Handmaid unprepared. A cheat's move, really, to cold-cock someone without warning. And then suddenly, the pain is back, that gaping pit of nothingness that she is forced to reckon with once more. 

There's nothing left. Nothing. Not when even hitting the Handmaid no longer brings satisfaction for more than a fleeting moment.

And then there's the answer to all her prayers, moments later as she kneels next to Offred beside the tub. A baby. A real baby of her own, after all this time, things can finally change and she can have something again. God has seen her suffering and deemed her worthy.

She must think of more. Something to keep the Handmaid in line for this pregnancy, she says to herself, not willing to stop hating yet, and seeking insurance all the same. This Offred is a devil, malicious and manipulative, and her husband is prone to follow her whims, no doubt. She will have absolutely nothing in this lonely world without this child, so she makes a plan.

It helps that Nick stays silent, like the loyal team player he always has been to the Waterfords.

Serena imagines the worst thing she can think of to punish someone as impudent and insufferable as this Handmaid. And she does it, because it feels good, because she wants to, because Offred deserves it, because it’s new and exciting, and mostly because the taste of power is too delectable to pass up. She controls it all; she causes Offred to break down. The flurry of insults barely brushes her skin because she’s so high on the pain she’s inflicting. Each scream is another lick of now-forbidden ice cream on a sweltering summer day. Absolutely sacramental, really.

Yes, Serena Joy did this. She provoked this collapse. She still has some power left. God, it feels good to finally do something _significant_ regardless of how unseemly it is to others. When they arrive home again, the house is too quiet and Offred has tired herself out, just like an infant. Her heavy boots stomp up the stairs, but lack the vigour of a true tantrum.

\----

No more games. No more bullshit.

_...your baby, Mrs. Waterford_ , is all she catches, snapping from the cyanide-laced daze she's in. It echoes, dangerously. A thunderous cracking like an ice sheet breaking in a spring thaw spreads through the quiet room as she glances at the ultrasound.

Offred's eyes are so icy blue under the glaring white lights, when she flinches away for the second time ever, making it clear the intimidation has finally worked. Serena wonders if the baby will have those eyes too. Something in her gut lurches at the idea.

She doesn't have to, and she's not entirely sure why she does, but she leaves Offred with a lingering kiss and a blessing instead. 

\----

92 days.

The first week was gloriously boiling over with visitors, chatter, prayers, and a buzzing excitement. Oh, how much attention she received for her devious missing Handmaid. So many baskets of sweets, flowers, visits from Wives from all over, and Commanders all brimming with righteous indignation. It doesn’t smell like that university foyer at all, with the stale antiseptic floor wash, and the sweat of young, stupid bodies all crammed into a small space. But it sounds similar, and that’s what Serena Joy wants most of all: recognition.

To be seen with her sacrifice and hardship is the best she can wish for since being heard is against the laws.

Everyone keeps saying “kidnapped”. Yes, of course. Kidnapped.

But after two weeks, the furore drops to a simmer. Another week later and it has all but fizzled completely, leaving her to stew in its wake and nobody left to look or listen to her many, many grievances. So-called friends have even grown tired. 

92 days.

Suddenly, there is nothing but routine again. Back to normal, they say. But Serena Joy truly, utterly resents normal now and Fred Waterford drinks more coffee.

Tea. Toast with butter. The greenhouse. The click of knitting needles. Wives who avoid the subject of missing Handmaids. Three kinds of soup. No fish. No mushrooms. A blue room. An empty bed. Unanswered prayer. 

Suffocating outrage claws into her chest and makes a home while the loneliness returns. She hadn't even realised that had disappeared until it came back again. Now she cannot shake the reason. 

Not Offred, she claims. The baby and the promise. It is what she misses, and what feels missing like a hole in the chest, or a gunshot wound in the womb.

On the 91st day, there is no coffee and no butter at breakfast.

She rages at Rita although they all know better where the fault lies, and Fred gives her only the most cursory of disinterested glances at her reaction. These explosions have become startlingly commonplace now. She fumes in her greenhouse and accidentally cuts a fresh white bloom from a new rose shoot in her haste to prune another plant. It drifts to the tabletop, and she sees those three roses from before, when her hope was snatched away by the Handmaid the first time. Without thought or care, she smashes both pots against the hard, damp concrete and listens for the crack of pleasure such violence elicits. None comes. It’s only Rita, knocking at the door with a broom in her hand.

On the 92nd day, there is a different sort of knock and the Handmaid is there, fully pregnant and wholly unapologetic. Her body language may belay a sort of surrender, but her eyes--those eyes Serena seems to know better each time she sees them--they scorn and pity, inciting shame. They refuse to say sorry for anything. Heat rises in her legs, up her thighs, into her stomach where it burns, burns, burns, too hot and too uncomfortable. This woman will not break her this time. So, when he reaches for her, her hand laces with her husband’s. No, Offred will not break this, and will be reminded about where this baby belongs: to a stable family of husband and wife, to be raised in Gilead’s image. It will not emerge from between those whore’s legs and fester through its life like its mother has, trapped only between sex and sin.

She is a good Gilead Wife, with a powerful Commander as a husband to serve, and this cannot have broken them so easily. 

_Praised be_.

They’re the first words they’ve spoken to each other in 92 days and it ropes around her throat like a noose.

The Handmaid cocks her head to the side, smiling at nobody else in the room except her, and Serena sets her jaw as a dark need pulses through her veins. Her own body attempts to mirror Offred, her head tilting just enough, loosening, just for a second in confusion for what her body is doing, and it’s again, an unfamiliar feeling to be caught even slightly off guard anymore. The fire licks up her chest into her neck, probably staining her skin a light shade of pink. She hates that too. More than anything, the betrayal of her body to its elemental desire and whims brings bile onto the back of her tongue.

The Handmaid’s voice drifts out, smugly, _I know the way_.

That is the moment Serena breaks, her breath catches in her throat, lips parting with a bewildering mixture of agitation and hunger that cracks her ribs open. She wants Offred to hurt like she is, wants her to hate like she does, wants her to thirst and cry and regret being alive too.

_Fuck you too_ , she wants to scream.

Of course she follows her upstairs where they can be alone. Her graceful hands push against a soft throat, her body resisting the urge to tighten and crush that fragile windpipe, like suffocating a candle flame. She can. She owns that power. She can end it now. All of it would fall apart because no one would cover for a Wife that strangles a pregnant Handmaid to death. But she wants to. Her feeble whimpers echo in the silence as the Handmaid does nothing except smirk, arrogance and the glaze of someone who has won in her eyes. 

And she has. It’s Serena that has lost control this time; it is Serena who is subject to every vagary, every twitch of Offred’s lips, every sway of her body and flicker of resistance in her blue eyes. Her chest hurts, like drowning in a rough ocean, choking with the force it takes to remain in place and not do more.

_ De profundis clamavi ad te. _

She has lost control. There is nothing left.

\----

When her hand lies atop a sullenly defiant Offred in a circle of blessings, sparks shoot up her arm. Nobody sees the way her whole soul lurches at the contact, and she blames the atmosphere. How heavy and meaningful and _sacred_ it all is. 

Later, when Offred mentions the daughter from before with nothing but malicious intent, she loses herself again and Rita falls heavily to the floor instead. That callous, reactive act is a threat and a brutal confession all in one. Her body is infused with envy, loathing, and especially fear when she even senses the other woman nearby. And Offred sees it for the first time perhaps, after an entire day of pushing all Serena's buttons with expertise. She knows.

But after 94 days, at least things are no longer normal.

\----

She's nothing, Fred assures her.

Except the Handmaid doesn't feel like nothing, and she certainly doesn't act like nothing. Nothing can't get under her skin this way, and stinging her from the inside. She's well-acquainted with a life of nothing, and the yawning chasm it induces. This is definitely not what that feels like. _This_ is why she needs to go. Fred does his best but there's something in his tone that sounds placating and weak. She keeps trying to think about the baby instead. Focus on the baby. It's all for the baby.

All she wants is a cigarette, and revenge.

\----

It’s certainly not normal to crawl into Offred’s bed, lie next to her and splay her fingers over the growing bulge of life within her abdomen while whispering prayers. There’s a smell to the room, and she realises it’s the same scent that floats over her in her worst moments of loneliness as well. It’s the musky snare of a woman’s skin, so close to her nose that she can taste the flavour at the back of her throat. The best she can do is breathe deeply and swallow the urges she can’t even name. 

Maybe Offred is awake and notices the way Serena hesitates, just for a tiny second after she places her mouth across a waist that flares her nostrils with the scent of intoxicating motherhood. That’s what she calls it. That’s where the blame is. It’s the Handmaid’s fault, and it’s why she doesn’t dare look at any place on her body other than the swell of pregnancy ballooning under thin sheets and even thinner cotton nightgowns.

She wonders why it feels like her flesh is being seared from bone with every shared breath in this very quiet room, especially when her lips meet living warmth and her body tugs towards its source. _But he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire_. And Serena is desperate for salvation.

The next night, she does it again. And the next.

Then that too becomes normal, even if she still wakes up alone.

\----

They walk: it’s good for the baby, Aunt Lydia chides in that insufferable way she has. It is a new routine, but a regularity all the same. She exchanges pleasantries with other Wives, covetous glances being stolen all around but masquerading as delight and concern. The live children are prized possessions—or blessings, of course, and the unborn one is extra special. It makes Serena special too. She is so sick and tired of being a Wife, of being ordinary once more. Now, she may be a Wife but she will soon be a Mother.

Nobody mentions how Serena is still bringing her Handmaid everywhere she goes, even now. Doctor’s orders is the easy excuse. It is the only one. Nobody mentions how the doctors never actually order constant supervision.

It’s not the quitting smoking that causes Serena’s fingers to twitch, or her bottom lip to be chewed into a raw, bloody pulp. It’s not even where her anger is formed. _I formed thee in thy belly_ , not in the head. It was hunger, not thought. A bodily desire, not a philosophical one. 

She brings a stop to her nightly visits. 

Finally Offred is easy to manage. She no longer argues, or even speaks without being spoken to. There are no nasty quips about the previous daughter or husband, no sly comments about marriage or Fred or even the terrible smoothies that she force feeds herself daily. Her eyes don’t sparkle and her skin doesn’t flush red. Not once have her lips even attempted to display that hubris that was once such a permanent fixture. In all ways, she is now the perfect, docile, obedient, well-behaved Handmaid Serena has always wanted.

She is far too much like the first one, that meek useless thing who merely took up space, food, and Fred’s deadened semen.

Everything is too regular. She rises from bed alone to grey and ever-winterised skies. There is tea still, with toast and butter. Then they walk together—or so it is meant to seem—but more and more, Serena feels as if she is leading a reluctant dog on a leash. And not a difficult dog, or even a mildly spirited one—more the sort of tired hound that once had a purpose but only now sees the darkened end. There are no more foxes to hunt, only slowly atrophying muscles and the scrape of bone on bone in his joints. 

It is far beyond her capacity to admit that there is something she misses.

\----

Instead, she attempts to break things further. Partly, it seems like a desperate ploy to get a rise out of the lifeless Handmaid again. But jealousy leaks through her pores, then her clothes, then pools at her feet. She splashes in it every step she takes.

She lights the match this time and drops loaded whispers in Fred's ear. As a result, Nick gets gifted a young, blonde, virile wife.

That should do it.

\----

_Not again._

What will the neighbours think? What will the other Wives think? What will the Committee think? Another Handmaid, another suicide. Serena will _never_ get her baby now.

Not again, not again, not again. She blames Fred, and he allows it, shrugging away her spurious accusations as if she is merely the help. 

During the day, she waits and knits and watches the screen blip, up and down, up and down, with two heartbeats. There is no toast with butter for her here. Only hospital cafeteria food, like strange puddings and whole wheat cereals. It’s different. For four nights, she sleeps in a chair at Offred’s bedside ignoring the protest of her spine in the morning and the sneers of the orderly. 

Nobody says anything about that arrangement either. Not even Naomi Putnam who gives her a curious look, laced with something wary when she visits, only the once.

\----

Yes, if Offred was in any state to use stairs regularly, Serena is more than aware she would insist she joins her in her bed. It’s much better for the baby. It’s warmer, with better lumbar support and she can keep a close eye on the Handmaid for any aches, pains, or impulses to suicide. There is nothing untoward about the suggestion because obviously it is all for the baby. But she must settle for second best: sleeping where they are both uncomfortable but it’s strange, and fresh. It makes Serena’s skin flush and prickle. Excitement.

There is no routine now.

Everything she does is new. Doting on Offred feels right. Natural even to swap places like this, back and forth. It must be the maternal instincts, she tells herself when she recognises what’s happening. A stream of relief flows down from her head to her toes when she finds herself able to relax, and relinquish control to Offred now. 

Offred leads, Serena follows.

That is definitely not familiar, or even safe.

This time Offred reaches out for her hand, instead of the opposite, and the way she doesn’t let go is pleasant. Her hand is warm and gentle on Serena’s, teaching and patient. Nobody has touched her that way as long as she can remember, especially not Offred who has never touched her without coercion before. It feels much more like a partnership, and they easily fall into sync.

Serena can suddenly picture the rest of the remaining months just like this. In those days, she forgets Fred even exists.

\----

It ends, as it was bound to do, she supposes. Balance like that is too precarious a thing to have for long in this place. The lack of surprise doesn’t alleviate the sheer sense of defeat that crawls into her muscles, sets up camp, and freezes them solid, including her heart. But before that, it does catch her out, it does shock her, she can’t believe the words coming from Offred’s mouth. They were meant to be thinking about this baby together, that’s all. Meanwhile, all the Handmaid had been plotting was a way to fool Serena, to lull her into false assurance, to prey on her kindness.

She hears only hollow prayers. _The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart_.

Serena can’t even find it in herself to be angry immediately. She cries instead, like a heart-broken teenager and barely can form the words to forge the breakup. 

\----

The choler comes later in the sanctity of her greenhouse. And Fred hones in on it like a shark with the scent of blood in the water, drawing up beside her to chant in her ear again, clearly pleased that the storm has passed and female estrangement—the regular, desirable state of being—has returned to his household. 

The nasty Offred has also returned.

Somewhere deep inside her gut, something roils pleasantly to see that smirk again, the narrowing of Offred’s eyes when they face off, and the way her chin juts out just that little bit.

_ Qui purgantur ardore nimio...  _

\----

When she hears the news, her first question isn’t about her husband. It’s about the Handmaid. Guilt ravages her all the way to the hospital as a result, and every one of the swirling voices in her head reminds her that within this upside down world, there is no safety, no place, no power for her in Gilead without a husband. If she wants to survive, so must he because no Wife is worth anything without a Commander. One fingernail is chewed to the quick by the time she arrives but the pain is necessary as penance for her thoughtlessness. Serena Joy never chews her fingernails.

It’s much more socially acceptable to stay beside a husband’s bedside than another woman’s, regardless of who she is. As such, nobody so much as blinks when she spends the night in a chair. 

She hates how her heart leaps into her throat when Offred enters the room and her body is immediately drawn to her like an elastic band snapping back. Offred can't take her eyes off Fred, and Serena feels warmth build behind her eyes, and in the pit of her stomach. Why is that such a threat? She turns away, wrestling control of the meeting again, putting herself in its centre.

Her baby is safe. _It's here_ , she tells Fred, knowing his interest lies elsewhere, lower and wetter than the swell of a pregnant belly.

\----

Something drags her home that night, back into shadows and as far away from her incapacitated husband as she can be. Closer to the baby, she thinks. The baby. Not the Handmaid.

Of course, Offred is right there. Waiting. Snacking. Abusing her freedom without Nick, Fred, or Serena around. She could say something worse, and she could flex her power, but a half-hearted scolding is all that materialises because in truth, she's too tired to fight. She wants the sweet scald of liquor down her throat and the heady, dizzying effects of it on her mind. 

For some reason, they talk. Like real people, with hidden agendas, of course but like one woman to another.

And Serena listens. For once. She blames the alcohol for the way she allows Offred to use the unborn child to manipulate her.

\----

That night, once that household has settled, she digs through Fred's cabinets and reads June Osborne’s file front to back, twice over. She studies the photographs, the names, the job titles, and education. These pages only contain the skeleton of a person, but that is exactly what she becomes, at least. More than a womb with an antagonistic mouth. 

In another world, they could have been colleagues.

Serena Joy catches herself, just for one stupid, blasphemous moment, thinking how much better that would have been. She tosses the pen down and recites scripture under her breath to centre herself in the present again. However, the trembling in her fingers—the way they ache to take hold of that instrument of sin again—betrays the words sneaking out from between her lips.

\----

Finally, after so many years, she can smirk at the Handmaid. It’s something forbidden, another tiny sin shared in the quiet, in the dark. She stares at the red note to the left of the first paragraph in elegant penmanship she didn’t expect. Why should a woman like that have chicken scratch? There are scribbles too, further down the page, done in a much bigger hurry but that note, about passive voice and word order, stands out. She imagines an entire manuscript in that handwriting, thoughtful and determined, yet somehow handsome. 

Serena Joy remains in her blue dress, and Offred in red, but there is an equality, if not unity, that seeps into their private time in the study.

It is the sort of routine Serena could get used to.

Every evening this happens. The fireplace is lit. Serena boils water, or sometimes Offred does. They make tea, perhaps a snack, and they work. Some of it isn’t even necessary work, Serena knows, but it’s something to do and read and write. It’s time spent together in the den of men’s privilege breaking every norm the society has denied them. Mornings still contain tea and toast, afternoons the trappings of Wifehood and the occasional visit from Nick to pick up papers, but the evenings, after dinner, are their time. They talk like coworkers, back and forth without the rancor that Fred’s presence, Gilead, and the prohibition of the written word has spawned in the past. Each conversation is new, bursting full of ideas and lacking pretence. It works her mind that has for so long remained immobile. Meanwhile, Offred listens, responds, engages, challenges. Serena would be lying if she claimed it was anything less than enthralling. It consumes her.

The see-saw of ideas bouncing back and forth, up and down, between them has been missing in her life for so many years. She yearns for dinner to be over, and itches for the moment she can move towards the study. It is her desk now, her computer, her study, _her_ writing. Her pulse races when Offred joins her and picks up the red pen, or when she leans over her shoulder as she types—something Serena in the past has only despised anybody attempting to do. She pours Offred a cup of tea and puts on slow jams and Motown records she’s found hidden between all Fred’s much more acceptable classical masters. Her breathing stutters when Offred casually, idly hums her name to call her attention. Little pieces of her life from before sneak out between the cracking foundation of Gilead, and when Offred speaks of her time before, Serena cannot taste the bitterness that was once so automatic. Trading trinkets of the past, compliments, and pieces of themselves in hushed tones with careful smiles, becomes the new normal. That is what they leave for one another amongst all the red scribbles and typed pages.

With equal parts horror and awe, she realises: in all this intimacy, in these scribbled love letters of editorial corrections, they are having an affair without even touching.

It’s metaphysical, and not quite real. It certainly cannot last in this world but Serena had forgotten what work was, especially how rewarding it is. And to work alongside somebody so capable, and someone who exists in the same space, on the same level is a pleasure she has very rarely experienced. It shifts everything, just slightly off-kilter.

\----

Offred’s pregnancy is always there, but fades into the periphery during work. It is no longer the most important thing about her or the most important aspect of her role here. Serena catches herself, when she can, and grounds herself to Gilead’s structure and ideals by thinking about roles, and motherhood, and her husband who has been gone for so long. Even so, that forced thought fades as soon as Offred speaks or hands over an edited page.

The idea that the baby she carries is anything other than a Waterford waiting to be born is still indisputable. That baby will be Serena’s. But the woman cradling it in her womb is something more now. She’s beyond a Handmaid.

Perhaps that is the most dangerous discovery of all.

\----

When Serena dreams, on those rare occasions she does, it is rarely about tangible things. Never sex. Not like that, which sometimes surprises her seeing as she is denied even basic intimacy with her husband but she has paralysed all urges. It’s rarely about pain either. There are shades of blues, blacks, reds, whites. There are emotions, uncomfortable ones mostly and inciting fear often. But there’s a romantic quality to some, something very intimate and engrossing, in the most vague ones that she can never quite grasp upon waking. So often, she’s left merely with a feeling as she lies in her empty bed and stares at the pale blue ceiling, wondering. Sometimes that feeling—whatever it is—flares to life in the kitchen when the Handmaid arrives for breakfast.

It’s about the baby, she says again to herself as she knits a yellow sweater. Motherhood is so close she can taste it. It’s about the baby, she repeats when Offred enters the den at night and she is swept away in it again.

\----

The fantasy crashes down one evening as they are sitting in silence. Serena sips her herbal tea and squints at the computer screen while Offred quietly reads over a pile of seemingly inconsequential reports for background. She doesn’t need to, Serena knows. But it’s a treat to read anything at all so Serena allows it as long as she is afforded the ability to watch her read, just every so often. Just a lingering glance. That’s a treat too, to see such a smart girl reading once again. 

The danger begins as a wince that Serena misses entirely. Then it develops into a whimper, but Offred bites her lip and shakes her head, pushing the discomfort aside. That does get Serena’s attention but it wavers as nothing more comes of it.

Until it does. She cries out, just a short burst of sound and grabs at her rotund belly, clenching her eyes shut and one hand going white on the arm of her chair.

This is the stuff of nightmares. 

It’s too early for the baby. It’s the wrong time of day. Fred isn’t here. Nothing is right.

So, Serena freezes in her seat and watches.

Offred yelps again, clutching both hands around herself now.

“Offred?” Her voice comes out weak, shaky. Unprepared.

With a dismissive shake of her head that any other time would feel personally offensive, some affront to Serena's vast second-hand knowledge about motherhood and pregnancy, Offred waves off her concern. Again, normally, that would flare her anger like a sun spot. But instead Serena waits, because right now, Offred leads again.

She claims it's nothing, just cramps, or gas, or a kicking baby. She would know, but Serena can't accept it. Not when they're this close and anything can go wrong. She read the literature once upon a time, all the medical articles and journals and first-hand experiences of miscarriages, still births, fatal defects, spontaneous abortions, such a heaping mountain of the most terrible outcomes possible. Worrying was never a particularly fond past time of hers before, but it’s all she does now. Every wince or cringe from Offred make sparks fire in her belly and she runs on a motor, fuelled only by fear. And greed. There’s always greed lurking underneath it all because she’s not worried for some other woman’s child; she is concerned for her own.

Serena lies. 

She lies well, and to herself mostly, but also to Offred with startling frequency. It is about making sure the baby is well, and thus the mother. It is about companionship maybe, at the very most. Those are excellent and reasonable criteria for the suggestions she makes. It’s another lie to tell herself they’re not lies.

It is not about loneliness, and it's certainly not about anything beyond that, like the way her skin feels not quite like her own when Offred lingers too close, or the way her stomach twists and her breath catches when she first wakes in the morning and feels empty. It can't be about any of those things at all. 

So, when Serena insists that the attic is too chilly and damp, and the mattress too infirm although she’s never been concerned by that in the past, she is definitely not thinking about any of that. Only about the baby. When she demands—with very little tenderness in her tone—that the Handmaid shares her bed for the night, her only thought is the baby. A warm baby, a happy baby, a healthy baby. Her baby.

Neither she nor Offred bring up the other beds available in the household, just as luxurious, and equally well heated. Perhaps Offred is too timid, no, that doesn't seem like her. But regardless, she weakly protests even if she knows it is not a suggestion. It is a command.

\----

There's nothing to it. This was common amongst all types of nobility once, and clearly a part of growing up now as well. Friends, sleepovers, one bed, many feet. Serena didn't have many of those, but she knows about them. 

This is just like that.

Except, perhaps, the searing, aching, longing sensation that flutters out along her spine and seeks refuge between her legs, and ears, and lungs until she can’t breath normally anymore. It's particularly bad during the first few moments Offred reluctantly crawls under the duvet. Worse even when Serena wakes in the middle of the night and feels a warm body beside her for the first time in years.

Serena is allowed to touch anything in her bed however she likes, so she does. It's her baby. Like before, her fingers brush along the pregnant swell and her mouth whispers a prayer.

Offred must be tired of pretending to be asleep. She says nothing but her muscles tense and she doesn’t quite move away, but there’s a shift. That much is obvious. Her breathing is ragged, or perhaps that is all in the imagination. Eventually, as the words of blessing are coming to a close, Offred reaches down, taking that invasive hand and places it closer towards her heart. 

Trapped between the heat of Offred’s palm and the oven of her body, Serena is ignited as well. Her pulse races, and blood rushes in her ears. Until there is the familiar kick of a tiny foot. Right there, under her hand. 

A rasping breath erupts from Serena at the sensation, and she coils tighter, almost pulling up against the backside of her Handmaid. They remain that way until she's satisfied the baby is done. 

_Thank you_ , she says, unsure who she's speaking to, whether it is the Handmaid, the baby, or God. 

That is the only time they touch.

\----

Toast and butter has nothing on her new addendum to her daily schedule. Despite all her protestations and comforting, Serena cannot accept any other arrangement. The Handmaid _will_ sleep in her bed. For the baby's sake. She can bond better with her child in such a quiet environment. It is what is needed, regardless of what the Aunts may think. 

Each night: routine. She prepares for bed, and crawls under the sheets. A few minutes later, there will be footsteps, perhaps a knock. Serena will allow her in, and Offred will nod in acknowledgement, and climb in next to her mistress. They will lie there in the near-darkness and shifting orange glow from the fire, saying nothing, and remaining on separate sides of the bed. All night. But it’s warm, and feels safer somehow. Strength in numbers, people used to say.

There is something wrong when Offred is there first, sitting in her bed, waiting. Like every night, her hair is down, messy waves from being twisted up in the requisite style all day, but it's still shorter than regulation. Serena doesn't often have any reason to see Offred in such a state, but when she does… 

The Handmaid has taken to this bed like she belongs there, like it's hers, like she is laying claim to it. Maybe she should, Serena supposes. Someone should. And now, at night after they have done their work, she arrives and stays. _Their_ bed sounds too significant, too sinful really especially in the absence of Fred—her _husband—_ but Serena can’t be sure anymore whose it is. As Serena enters her own bedroom to see Offred sitting up in bed, waiting, all she can think is: there’s something missing. She should have her hands full, and her mind occupied instead.

A book. A magazine. A mobile phone. Perhaps even a laptop. A private smile.

Her room is chilly tonight, despite the fireplace being active all day, and she shudders as her bare feet slide over the hardwood floor towards her bed. Yes, it is Serena’s bed. Not Offred’s. And Offred just stares, too placidly to be comfortable. It’s so quiet and the floorboards creak in warning as Serena draws nearer. The words from earlier in the evening ring too loudly without others to fill the space.

_He’s coming home tomorrow_.

This near-Heaven has fallen. Back to the flames of Purgatory.

_Praised be_. She wonders if Offred is getting as sick of saying those damned words as she is. Her echoing mantra comes out, bitten short and reluctant. It is simply too much effort now to hide much more.

Dread--no, positive _expectation and relief_ is what she should feel and she attempts to settle it back into her bones. Something is shaking and she realises it is her hands when she perches faintly on the edge of her own mattress as the Handmaid watches, quietly, too quietly. A fox waiting patiently for the hen to emerge from the coop. Offred's eyes narrow like the predator she is and Serena attempts to ignore the way her pulse quickens and how alive she feels by turning away and sliding under the duvet without a word. 

The fireplace throws shifting shadows against the walls, and they fall around her like ghosts, possession lapping at her heels. It's dark aside from that orange glow and Offred still stares, on her side, unflinchingly. Eerie is the only word for it. They have never done this, each lying watching the other. Warily. Why are they doing this? She wants to ask but it is unlikely she would receive any satisfactory answer. 

_He's coming home tomorrow._

The words bounce--ricochet violently from one corner of her mind to the next, knocking all sense out of her and allowing something else in. Fear, perhaps? Maybe it's light instead. It has been so long since Serena has truly felt the sun on her face.

She detests how final everything sounds.

If they are truly stuck in this stage between life and death, there is no meaning left to cling to. Faithlessness seems equally as harmless as doing nothing at all at this point. Honestly, what is the point of any of it anymore? 

The yellow glow flickers and licks across Offred’s cheek, but her stare never falters. It feels familiar, in a sense, too much like that moment she came back from her attempted escape. Serena allows her jaw to slide open a little, breathing in through her mouth. Or trying to. 

_He's coming home tomorrow._

It may as well be an epitaph on her tombstone.

When it becomes too much, she acts out of nothing she’s ever had to name before. It’s an impulse borne from fear perhaps, or an attempt to cling to a life that will never be and has never actually been. But it’s worth everything and nothing for simply the chance to behave most unlike Serena Joy Waterford in a world that is nothing close to the one outside those bedroom doors. She is repulsed by the thought of regularity again, of normality and monotony.

What happens however, well, there is no reason other than a lack of reason.

Serena Joy doesn’t kiss women. She isn’t a gender traitor. She doesn’t weave her fingers into blonde locks and anchor her mouth desperately to soft lips. She certainly doesn’t gasp at the jolt it sends through her limbs, and the way her thighs begin quivering for absolutely no reason. She doesn’t relish the sweeping tingle that flows over her body, ebbing back, only to surge forward again with every minuscule movement. She simply doesn’t kiss women at all.

Except she does. 

Apparently.

She certainly would not have expected Offred to kiss her back, but she does for some reason she'd rather not consider, and Serena can’t breathe at the mere idea of that. Her head pounds, and her heart races, and her hands tighten, and her body shifts and pushes, her stomach clenches, her breath gets lost somewhere in Offred’s mouth instead.

Neither knows why. 

But somehow, Serena wonders if this is exactly what she’d needed the entire time. No, this is worshipping the baby, in a roundabout way but it’s for the baby. Surely it’s not for her and the way her nerves frazzle and her nipples harden and her thighs begin to dampen between her legs. Offred bites down, hard, in her usual petty revenge, sending a spark of both anger and something else straight through Serena’s bottom lip to her dizzying mind. She can’t fucking breathe. But she tastes blood like holy water flooding her mouth.

_Serena_. 

Her name comes out as a whispered, pathetic groan from Offred’s lips, caught in the absence of space between their mouths. Nothing else has sounded quite so much like a hymn before. All she manages is a short whimper in return, squeezing her eyes closed tightly where she can see Offred’s real name in black typed font at the top of a page.

A hiss slithers out as Serena scrapes her fingers up a strong thigh, pushing the flimsy cotton nightgown up, until her large hand complete with thick wedding band covers the large swell of a pregnant abdomen. If they all can have her, Serena should too.

_Mine_ , Serena thinks. _All mine_.

Her fingernails, or what’s left of them, dig into a soft feminine hip and the resulting flare through her own belly threatens to overwhelm her again. She’s choking on nothing at all. That baby is nestled tight between their bodies, safe and warm, while her lips come down again and again and again on Offred’s, bruising a new cruelty into existence. Then there’s a tongue there too—a demanding tongue—and everything ends in a blinding white light.

\----

Perhaps it’s worse to get a glimpse of Heaven and lose it than to never see it at all.

Serena Joy Waterford thought she would have to die in order for God to grant such grace upon her. She lives it for a brief moment instead, right here, with all the other mortals as the fires of purification lap at her feet, then smoulder, and finally cool for the first time. 

Afterwards, with sore muscles and wet lips coated in prayer and worship, and a novel scent in the air that grips her entire body in desire still, she does wonder if this profane sort of lust is what Fred felt too, with her. What Nick has. And why all of them seem so taken with the same creature, the same body, the same divinity.

_He's coming home tomorrow._

With that one thought, she falls from grace again, roughly, and the ground below is cold. This will never and can never happen again. Heaven cannot be a place on earth, no matter what the songs say.

Offred sleeps next to her for the last time, her forehead dewy with sweat and Serena licking her lips to swallow the last taste she’ll ever have.

Part of her will welcome the return to tedium and routine because whatever this was, is not meant for a sinner like her. Not here. Not this temptation, and that is all it was because the Devil was playing tricks and mistook her love for her child for something else entirely. Forgiveness and penance is the only option, and she weeps inside to the Mother of Poor Souls, even if she has never believed.

\----

She leaves one set of curtains open overnight, so she can see everything more clearly in the morning light. She wants to rise before Offred, to escape the room before she wakes because Serena cannot bear to linger on the way her body betrayed her and she surrendered her remaining fragments of power to another woman. To her hands, and mouth, and thighs, and moans. She hates that in everything she'd given up for this world, every last vestige of control she'd ceded to men and God, everything pales in comparison to the overwhelming nothingness she feels as she wakes now, recognising the absence that is required now.

The remnants of Offred's most primal scent remains on her lips as she wets them with her tongue. For the baby, she insists again when the taste flicks at something dangerous between her legs. For the Handmaid too, for stress relief, so for the baby. The Devil works in mysterious ways, she supposes.

She aches.

When Serena begins to crawl from her own bed, she makes the mistake of glancing behind her at the sleeping body turned away from her, blonde hair tangled on her pillows, naked shoulders, naked arms, naked everywhere if not for the heavy blue duvet and high-thread count sheets. Same as her.

She aches more as her gaze lingers.

It's so bright. She remembers before. The hospital lights in their artificial glare have nothing on this stream of morning sunlight. Serena wonders for only the second time if her baby will have Offred's light blue eyes. This time, her stomach remains motionless.

\----

She doesn’t stop. Physically, yes, she must because the risk is too great and the reward too dangerous. But she can’t stay away. She leaves gifts (a box for locked secrets, a single rose, tendrils of blonde hair come loose, stolen glances) and stages late night visits; she relents and gives Offred everything she asks for, for Baby Angela. She tells herself again: it’s all for the children. It's not at all because of how Offred looks at her now, disdainful, full of forbidden knowledge and all too aware of the worst hypocrisy and cowardice this household has witnessed. 

And she doesn’t stop. Until Fred makes sure she does.

With twelve lashes against her bare skin, one for every disciple, with the Handmaid in attendance to her disgrace, she is ripped from the empyrean and thrown back into a pit. All the beasts howl back at her from their captivity as she lands amongst them: _it mustn't happen again_. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she wills herself not to look but Offred is dressed in red, in the flavour of Serena’s own blood when Offred bit down too hard. It’s the same smell of her own wounds now. She sees apple red and tastes everything from Offred, over and over. The forbidden juices of some sinful fruit drip down her face in her worst memories. All the while, the beasts continue to howl at her, a mournful and hollow sound.

Maybe it was thirteen lashes.

The number doesn’t matter. The only thing that does is the sound of Offred, whispering her name through the wooden door. Pleading and disappointed at once, almost like before. The word crawls all over her skin and burrows into the swollen wounds, eating away at them, making them larger and angrier. 

\----

The baby will be here soon.

A new kind of equilibrium, perhaps. That’s all that matters. Everything that rose and died inside Serena is of no consequence because the baby will fill in all the gaps and deliver meaning to empty days.

_For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me._

The Handmaid must leave as soon as possible. 

\----

Serena Joy begins each morning the same way: alone. Everyday the sun rises, sometimes managing to poke through heavy grey clouds, sometimes not. Each day, she has her tea with milk, coffee if she is lucky and her stomach doesn’t resist. Toast and butter too. Fred eats an egg or two, maybe has a slice of meat, and sips his two cups of black coffee, every day. He doesn’t allow it to cool any longer. He winces in pain from his leg when he sits for too long. He reads the papers published only for Commanders that once she and Offred worked on together, or stares at his laptop screen in earnest. They speak, maybe. Not so much anymore. She flinches when he rises from his seat, when he comes near, when he breathes too heavily.

In the afternoon, she secludes herself in the greenhouse, away from everyone else and especially away from _them_. Avoidance is the only answer. She prays more in there, alone. Mostly for her memories to die and the sensation of soft skin and hard muscles, grating breath, starving hands and fingers and mouths to fade. Yet it persists still. When the ritual runs low, she makes up her own prayers and dreams about a child of her own, and a husband that loves her, and violently pushes the Handmaid from her thoughts each and every time she strays. 

Lunch is soup, maybe a sandwich. No fish, no mushrooms, no fish, no mushrooms... The evenings, which once were filled with conversation and challenge, are silent. She stays in her sitting room, knitting perhaps, staring at the walls and counting down minutes until dinner or bed and letting bitterness bristle under her skin. 

She goes to bed alone. There is no knock, no footsteps, no creak of a door or complaint from the old hardwood as it bends underfoot.

\----

He wants to go to Canada, and Serena allows herself a moment to hope to be left behind as always. Her prayers, again, echo back down without a response. She is meant to go as well. Of course she cannot be left alone with the Handmaid. Fred knows better; he always has.

\----

When Serena wakes alone, again, in that blue room with ashes of a Hawaiian matchbook smouldering in her fireplace, she is still a Wife. That is all she’s ever going to be, with nothing of her own except the memory of her grandfather’s musty curtains and the cursed knowledge that every sacrifice has been for the same nothing. Her appetite for tea and toast vanishes and she tries to find comfort in the humidity of the greenhouse. Nothing works. The Handmaid comes and goes, petulant and angry, playing a vicious game again that Serena long ago learnt the rules to. She narrows her eyes when they share the same space. The hatred drips off of the Handmaid's shoulders and disdain leaks from her blue eyes, yet she still carries that child, coveting it as hers and Nick’s, and letting Serena know she has no claim. Serena cannot bear to look any longer. The air itself is permanently sour and the tang of iron lingers on her tongue, the memory both fresh and acidic. She longs to raise a fist to the Handmaid, and to knock her off-balance. Permanently.

The longer this goes on, the more her power wanes. She loses control to her nightmares, to Fred, to the Handmaid, to doctors and Aunts, to nature. At night, even her body betrays her as it tosses and turns and writhes in the cold. She's long forgotten the arcane rhapsody of her name being gasped, in desperation in the darkness of her bedroom.

She falls to her knees at Offred's feet too, to save whatever is left in the cracks, but Offred doesn't care for her faithless devotions any more than Fred did. She turns her back, waving a flag of dismissal. Realising she is truly abandoned, all Serena sees is _red_. The furious rising heat across her skin infuses her with humiliation, vengeance, and such a pathetic, useless wanting. 

She is nothing, not here, not in this never-ending stasis. Knowing now what is beyond that is torture, so the routine must break as soon as possible, and the only way for that is a baby. To barely glimpse at a life beyond this, but to see it for real all the same, was Hell itself.

She has to have that baby or she’ll die. Eternal fire or no fire, it is as simple as that. 

Praised be, _my hope, thou hast to save me_.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I wanted this to be a short piece. Very short. For @warning_sine's birthday which was like a month ago give or take lol, so you can tell what happened... I got carried away, yet again. So, basically I was looking at Femslash February prompts (not from that main tumblr, but many prompt calendars, all combined) for that and wanted to include a whole bunch of prompts into one short fic. It began that way, and then of course I can't help myself.
> 
> So, happy birthday, bb. <3 I'm sorry this is so late. It isn't what I had in mind at all, tbh. xx
> 
> \-------
> 
> Title and one of the quotes by Serena is from the "[Languentibus in Purgatorio (The Suffering Souls in Purgatory)](https://forum.musicasacra.com/forum/discussion/7535/holy-souls-chant/p1)". Another bit of Latin is from [Psalm 130](https://www.learnreligions.com/de-profundis-542782), "a penitential psalm", and often used for souls in Purgatory. The final little bit is from the "[Prayer of a Sinner to the Queen of Heaven](http://rectaratio.blogspot.com/2007_11_18_archive.html)". The Bible verses she mentions are [1 Corinthians 3:15](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+3%3A15&version=AKJV) and [Psalm 51: 3, 17](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_51).


End file.
